From:
An interview with Tomlinson Holman, pt. 1
by Matteo Milani, U.S.O. Project, April 2009
MM: You're in the film history, as you invented the "de-facto" standard of theater industry. How could you describe your early days at "Lucasfilm"?
Tomlison Holman (the T & the H): Heady. We were on a mission to improve the whole experience of going to the movies. THX was only one of the resulting developments, but it had the most public face eventually.
[excerpt from Droidmaker]:
People have been asking the question for years: what does THX stand for? And this is was exactly Jim Kessler's marketing intent: keep 'em asking question after question, and they're taking about you!" [...] "It's gotta sound cool, high-tech, and I wanted a way to credit Tom Holman, the inventor," said Kessler. Doodling around, "I just wrote the initials for Tom Holman Crossover on my desk one day." "Crossover" was a reference to the way the speakers divide the treble and bass for ideal acoustics. Traditionally, the crossover is done passively, in a loudspeaker. Holman had designed an electronic crossover. Kessler wrote "crossover" with an X, as in "X-over." He smiled as he recognized the letters THX from George's film THX 1138. "George always seemed to like them, and had used them as a private joke on a license plate on Harrison Ford's roadster in American Graffiti." Kessler liked that the name was both very "Lucas" and still not immediately identifiable as Lucas. "THX, that's perfect!" So Kessler rushed down the stairs and into the cool dark mixing theater beneath him, where Lucas was sleeping on the couch during another marathon Jedi mixing session. Lucas woke up and watched in silence as Kessler waved the paper around and ranted about how perfect the name would be. "Great" was all he said, and that was the end of it.
MM: You've invented a system that is a signal processing chain of different products, blending knowledge, math, material, and so forth. How did you manage this huge work of taking care of each small step during its development?
TH: With a lot of help, which I credited in the THX Manual. The ideas did come from many sources, some dating to the 1930's whereas some were brand new in 1980. It was my skill to: go to the MIT library and read the whole field within a week of getting the job (I was in Boston at my company 'Apt Corporation' at the time), selecting from amongst those developments the ones that made sense; working with John Eargle at JBL to find real products that would meet the standard sought; to assemble and figure out how to measure them; to exchange measurements with, and have experiments conducted, at Waterloo University (Stan Lipshitz, now retired, and John Vanderkooy); to select the LR4 crossover and get help in implementing it; to figure out how to make delay lines and fit poles and zeros with which I had help from Gordon Jacobs; then to build the crossover networks, find a manufacturer, etc. So there was lots of help but I performed an integration and leadership function.
From:
An interview with Tomlinson Holman, pt. 2
by Matteo Milani, U.S.O. Project, April 2009
MM: You've invented a system that is a signal processing chain of different products, blending knowledge, math, material, and so forth. How did you manage this huge work of taking care of each small step during its development?
TH: With a lot of help, which I credited in the THX Manual. The ideas did come from many sources, some dating to the 1930's whereas some were brand new in 1980. It was my skill to: go to the MIT library and read the whole field within a week of getting the job (I was in Boston at my company 'Apt Corporation' at the time), selecting from amongst those developments the ones that made sense; working with John Eargle at JBL to find real products that would meet the standard sought; to assemble and figure out how to measure them; to exchange measurements with, and have experiments conducted, at Waterloo University (Stan Lipshitz, now retired, and John Vanderkooy); to select the LR4 crossover and get help in implementing it; to figure out how to make delay lines and fit poles and zeros with which I had help from Gordon Jacobs; then to build the crossover networks, find a manufacturer, etc. So there was lots of help but I performed an integration and leadership function.
The invention came about after it was nearly finished. Standing one day at the base of a wall that contained the system, with my head stuck between the wall and screen, I heard lots and lots of high-frequency energy, and figured out that this was from multiple bounces between the wall and screen. The wall was needed to support low frequencies but was a problem at high frequencies, so covering the wall in high-frequency absorbing material made it disappear acoustically at high frequencies. That's the patent: more a "discovery" than an "invention" that I set out to do.
MM: How was the relationship with Dolby Laboratories? What's the output of your collaboration at that time?
TH: Dolby set the stage by improving film sound to the point where THX was worth doing. While they concentrated on the pipeline to get program material from studio to cinema and home, I concentrated on what happened to it once it was delivered. So they were compatible completely, although some ignorant parts of the marketplace thought one was supplanting the other and vice versa. Never was true.
MM: Few words on the development of Home THX.
TH: I went to CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in the mid-80's and found misrepresentations of the work of Ben Burtt and others, some of it deliberate, and some of it from a lack of knowledge. So I set our to better represent movies over home systems, and Home THX with its patented technology is the result. It also had a "better housekeeping seal of approval" component, especially in areas where people routinely stretched the truth, such as power amplifier output capacity. We used loudspeakers to test, not resistors, and some high-end products simply failed to pass the standard based on real program material into real loads.
An interview with Tomlinson Holman, pt. 1
by Matteo Milani, U.S.O. Project, April 2009
MM: You're in the film history, as you invented the "de-facto" standard of theater industry. How could you describe your early days at "Lucasfilm"?
Tomlison Holman (the T & the H): Heady. We were on a mission to improve the whole experience of going to the movies. THX was only one of the resulting developments, but it had the most public face eventually.
[excerpt from Droidmaker]:
People have been asking the question for years: what does THX stand for? And this is was exactly Jim Kessler's marketing intent: keep 'em asking question after question, and they're taking about you!" [...] "It's gotta sound cool, high-tech, and I wanted a way to credit Tom Holman, the inventor," said Kessler. Doodling around, "I just wrote the initials for Tom Holman Crossover on my desk one day." "Crossover" was a reference to the way the speakers divide the treble and bass for ideal acoustics. Traditionally, the crossover is done passively, in a loudspeaker. Holman had designed an electronic crossover. Kessler wrote "crossover" with an X, as in "X-over." He smiled as he recognized the letters THX from George's film THX 1138. "George always seemed to like them, and had used them as a private joke on a license plate on Harrison Ford's roadster in American Graffiti." Kessler liked that the name was both very "Lucas" and still not immediately identifiable as Lucas. "THX, that's perfect!" So Kessler rushed down the stairs and into the cool dark mixing theater beneath him, where Lucas was sleeping on the couch during another marathon Jedi mixing session. Lucas woke up and watched in silence as Kessler waved the paper around and ranted about how perfect the name would be. "Great" was all he said, and that was the end of it.
MM: You've invented a system that is a signal processing chain of different products, blending knowledge, math, material, and so forth. How did you manage this huge work of taking care of each small step during its development?
TH: With a lot of help, which I credited in the THX Manual. The ideas did come from many sources, some dating to the 1930's whereas some were brand new in 1980. It was my skill to: go to the MIT library and read the whole field within a week of getting the job (I was in Boston at my company 'Apt Corporation' at the time), selecting from amongst those developments the ones that made sense; working with John Eargle at JBL to find real products that would meet the standard sought; to assemble and figure out how to measure them; to exchange measurements with, and have experiments conducted, at Waterloo University (Stan Lipshitz, now retired, and John Vanderkooy); to select the LR4 crossover and get help in implementing it; to figure out how to make delay lines and fit poles and zeros with which I had help from Gordon Jacobs; then to build the crossover networks, find a manufacturer, etc. So there was lots of help but I performed an integration and leadership function.
From:
An interview with Tomlinson Holman, pt. 2
by Matteo Milani, U.S.O. Project, April 2009
MM: You've invented a system that is a signal processing chain of different products, blending knowledge, math, material, and so forth. How did you manage this huge work of taking care of each small step during its development?
TH: With a lot of help, which I credited in the THX Manual. The ideas did come from many sources, some dating to the 1930's whereas some were brand new in 1980. It was my skill to: go to the MIT library and read the whole field within a week of getting the job (I was in Boston at my company 'Apt Corporation' at the time), selecting from amongst those developments the ones that made sense; working with John Eargle at JBL to find real products that would meet the standard sought; to assemble and figure out how to measure them; to exchange measurements with, and have experiments conducted, at Waterloo University (Stan Lipshitz, now retired, and John Vanderkooy); to select the LR4 crossover and get help in implementing it; to figure out how to make delay lines and fit poles and zeros with which I had help from Gordon Jacobs; then to build the crossover networks, find a manufacturer, etc. So there was lots of help but I performed an integration and leadership function.
The invention came about after it was nearly finished. Standing one day at the base of a wall that contained the system, with my head stuck between the wall and screen, I heard lots and lots of high-frequency energy, and figured out that this was from multiple bounces between the wall and screen. The wall was needed to support low frequencies but was a problem at high frequencies, so covering the wall in high-frequency absorbing material made it disappear acoustically at high frequencies. That's the patent: more a "discovery" than an "invention" that I set out to do.
MM: How was the relationship with Dolby Laboratories? What's the output of your collaboration at that time?
TH: Dolby set the stage by improving film sound to the point where THX was worth doing. While they concentrated on the pipeline to get program material from studio to cinema and home, I concentrated on what happened to it once it was delivered. So they were compatible completely, although some ignorant parts of the marketplace thought one was supplanting the other and vice versa. Never was true.
MM: Few words on the development of Home THX.
TH: I went to CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in the mid-80's and found misrepresentations of the work of Ben Burtt and others, some of it deliberate, and some of it from a lack of knowledge. So I set our to better represent movies over home systems, and Home THX with its patented technology is the result. It also had a "better housekeeping seal of approval" component, especially in areas where people routinely stretched the truth, such as power amplifier output capacity. We used loudspeakers to test, not resistors, and some high-end products simply failed to pass the standard based on real program material into real loads.
